Over the last few decades, the employee-employer relationship has been hollowed-out...by the staffing industry and businesses that want to “hire” workers without the regulations and obligations that come with officially employing them.
"Adam Tooze’s greatest achievement," writes reviewer Chakrabortty, "is to chronicle what actually happened before, during and in the long aftermath of the biggest financial crash of our lifetimes. It sounds simple but it is radical."
The problem facing working people in the U.S. is not just lack of jobs, but lack of good jobs. UE's Director of Communications takes a look at what kinds of policies produce good jobs, UE's history of fighting for good jobs and a democratic economy,
Policymakers who are sincere about boosting wages would heed the advice of Mishel and Eisenbrey (2015), and undertake policy measures to redistribute economic leverage and bargaining power away from capital owners and corporate managers and back to low- and middle-wage workers.
Using policy to shift economic power and make U.S. incomes grow fairer and faster. Boosting income growth for the bottom 90 percent requires a policy agenda that explicitly aims to halt or reverse the rise in inequality. Finding no relationship between rising inequality and faster growth means raising living standards for the bottom 90 percent can likely be better for overall growth.
Hillary Clinton's record in office suggests that she is more liberal than either her husband or Barack Obama, and in a Monday speech outlining her economic vision she set out to confirm that. However, still lacking is much policy detail as to how this difference might look in practice. A future Clinton administration might help change the norms of corporate governance to foster the kind of labor relations that everyday workers have not experienced in decades.
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